Posted - 2011.11.17 01:46:00 -
[1] - Quote
The Eve Portraits contest is a brand-new competition to see who can create the most outstanding Eve Online character portrait.

The reason why I decided to create this contest, is because of the number of great portraits IGÇÖve seen in the game, and which I believe should be shared with the rest of the Eve Online community. The goal of the contest is to encourage player creativity, and provide in-game rewards for their efforts.

Since this will be the very first round of the contest, this should only be considered as an initial experiment. If the contest is a success, it will be continued.

Though itGÇÖs quite well-known that there are many scams which are allowed in Eve Online, this is not one of them. The contest is a legitimate competition with real prizes, and itGÇÖs also a fun way to showcase the amazing artwork and interesting character portraits that playerGÇÖs create within the game.

The Eve Portraits contest will give someone the chance to win a faction battleship, faction cruiser or faction frigate for just a 20 million isk entry fee, along with their characterGÇÖs portrait. A very nice Christmas present indeed!

3. One GÇ£redoGÇ¥ of your characterGÇÖs portrait submission is allowed, and no more, at the cost of an additional fee of 10 million isk, with a mail sent from the character to Reality X with the word GÇ£redoGÇ¥ in the subject heading. Nothing else should be written in the main content box of the mail.

4. Each round of the contest runs for 28 days from the official start date until the close date. After the round closes, judging will begin and the winners will be contacted and awarded their prizes shortly thereafter.

5. If the total number of entry fees does not amount to the value of the 1st place prize by the time of the closing date, then the 2nd tier prize will be awarded for 1st place, the 3rd tier prize for 2nd place, and a faction mod awarded for 3rd place.

6. No private conversations or mails to Reality X asking about the Eve Portraits contest are allowed. This is to keep the contest unbiased and fair. If this rule is broken even once, your entry into the current round of the contest will be invalidated and your entry fee will be kept. No exceptions. Any attempt at bribery of the judge will also result in your characterGÇÖs immediate disqualification for entry into the current round. All of the information you need to know is posted here, however Reality X will answer any questions about the contest in a public forum, such as this thread or in-game local chat.

Step 1. Send an in-game mail to Reality X from the character you wish to enter, with the word GÇ£contestGÇ¥ in the subject heading. Nothing else should be written in the main content box of the mail. Please DO NOT post here as your entry into the contest.

You will receive a mail of your characterGÇÖs entry into the contest upon verification of payment.

Please read and understand the rules before entering. Check the WinnerGÇÖs Gallery after the closing date to see the winning portraits. All winners will be notified in-game.

Round 1

Start Date: Friday Nov. 25, 2011 GÇô 6:00 PM EST (23:00 Eve Time)

Finish Date: Friday Dec. 23, 2011 GÇô 6:00 PM EST (23:00 Eve Time)

I will be the judge and final decision-maker over all character portrait submissions for the Eve Portraits contest.

Since 2005, I've been a known and respected member of the Eve Online community. Some of you may know me from selling rare commodities on contracts through my corporations, Dark Matter Commodities and Dark Energy Products. At no time have I ever scammed or attempted to scam any other members of the Eve community. I'm staking my reputation and business with this contest.

An accomplished artist and graphic designer for over 20 years, I'm confident that I've got the ability to make the final decisions for all winning portraits. An example of one of my paintings can be found here:

Posted - 2011.12.08 22:05:00 -
[12] - Quote
Guess what? If it looks, smells and sounds like a scam, then it is indeed a scam. I'm sorry but this looks, smells and sounds like a scam.

Pay you 20 mill to enter? WTF? New players don't even have 1 mill isk in their wallets, let alone 20 mill isk? Contest should be free for everyone to enter, especially if this is a brand-new competition.

Contest is judged only by you? Nope, it needs to have neutral judges picked at random, at least 3 of them.

Who is holding the prizes? If it's not a well know neutral secure 3rd party, there's no guarantee of prizes actually being available or being sent to winners.

I don't even want to talk about Rules #3 and #5. Those alone prove this is all about making the sponsor easy isk.

I've been very active in Eve for over 3 yrs now and I've never heard of you. Personally I totally dislike threads like this. Anybody advertizing a contest like this knows for a fact that the only real winner is the person sponsoring it.

Guess what? If it looks, smells and sounds like a scam, then it is indeed a scam. I'm sorry but this looks, smells and sounds like a scam.

Pay you 20 mill to enter? WTF? New players don't even have 1 mill isk in their wallets, let alone 20 mill isk? Contest should be free for everyone to enter, especially if this is a brand-new competition.

Contest is judged only by you? Nope, it needs to have neutral judges picked at random, at least 3 of them.

Who is holding the prizes? If it's not a well know neutral secure 3rd party, there's no guarantee of prizes actually being available or being sent to winners.

I don't even want to talk about Rules #3 and #5. Those alone prove this is all about making the sponsor easy isk.

I've been very active in Eve for over 3 yrs now and I've never heard of you. Personally I totally dislike threads like this. Anybody advertizing a contest like this knows for a fact that the only real winner is the person sponsoring it.

Hello, and thanks for your thoughts, it gives me the chance to state some hard facts.

If you've only been active in Eve for just over 3 years, there's likely a great number of people you've never heard of. First off, if you'd done just a tiny amount of research before going off on your little rant, you would have discovered that I've been an extremely active player in Eve since 2005. I've been in several corps, and before I started selling commodities I was a high-end officer mod trader. I personally know several of the most well-known players in the game. They are both customers and people I like to think of as my friends.

Second, both of my commodities businesses are very successful, so I've no need to scam for the contest entry fees. I make the amount of isk involved in this contest in just a few hours. The contract search history of Dark Matter Commodites and Dark Energy Products proves this. The prizes have already been purchased and can be found in my character's November contract search history. That said, it makes no sense to just give away expensive prizes for free. If you wanted to do that, just sit in Jita for an hour and donate to your hearts content. Entering a contest is taking a chance, and no risk should be without a little sacrifice. Also, the website domain cost me $10 bucks, not to mention my time and effort organizing and advertising this contest. I will hardly be making any isk, if anthing at all. It's possible I could actually lose isk.

Lastly, I tried to get an extremely well-known player to be the judge, but they gracefully declined. Since I've been an artist my entire life, and having worked a great deal in portrait art, it made sense that I could be a very good judge of portrait design.

Personally, I really like this idea for a contest, and I'm proud and honored to be a part of it.

Guess what? If it looks, smells and sounds like a scam, then it is indeed a scam. I'm sorry but this looks, smells and sounds like a scam.

Pay you 20 mill to enter? WTF? New players don't even have 1 mill isk in their wallets, let alone 20 mill isk? Contest should be free for everyone to enter, especially if this is a brand-new competition.

Contest is judged only by you? Nope, it needs to have neutral judges picked at random, at least 3 of them.

Who is holding the prizes? If it's not a well know neutral secure 3rd party, there's no guarantee of prizes actually being available or being sent to winners.

I don't even want to talk about Rules #3 and #5. Those alone prove this is all about making the sponsor easy isk.

I've been very active in Eve for over 3 yrs now and I've never heard of you. Personally I totally dislike threads like this. Anybody advertizing a contest like this knows for a fact that the only real winner is the person sponsoring it.

Twenty million for a CHANCE at those prizes. Especially given that (even though this isn't true for cherries) twenty million isn't very much. An alt of mine entered into the contest immediately after researching X a bit. The name was vaguely familiar to me, and he stacks up against his claims. It's all good in the hood, son.

Posted - 2011.12.10 22:59:00 -
[16] - Quote
Well, I'm not going to spend time researching another players history just like you obviously didn't bother to research mine.

I've been extremely active in Eve and in the Forums for 3 1/2 years and I personally know some of the well-known players in the game. Just because you make statements as fact and have a character that's 7 years old doesn't prove you correct, trustworthy or make the contest Legit.

All of my questions and viewpoints are valid and justified.

If your commodity businesses are so very successful, then there is no need to charge an entry fee, plain and simple. As I stated in my earlier post, new players don't have that type of isk available. As for running a scam contest and having your business reputation being at stake, I highly doubt that would happen since the commodity businesses are a separate entity.

Doesn't matter if you bought the items or prizes and can show proof in a contract. The only acceptable proof is having the prizes secured and held in escrow by a neutral well known secure 3rd party.

Since this is supposedly the first of many contests being planned for the future, it makes sense to have the initial contest free for everyone to enter. That would create a lot of excellent publicity which is always good for future business.

Quote:

Entering a contest is taking a chance, and no risk should be without a little sacrifice. Also, the website domain cost me 10 bucks, not to mention all of my time and effort organizing and advertising, and everyone knows that time is money. It's also possible I could actually lose isk hosting this contest. Since this is an initial experiment for me to gauge the amount of interest, it's conceivable that future contests may have a lower entry fee.

Your quoted statement is not relevant to the validity of this contest. That is all overhead costs due to you deciding to invest your time and real life money to create this contest with the intention to make a lot of easy in-game isk for you. I don't see how you could lose any isk hosting this contest. Especially since you're the one who is sponsoring the contest, collecting up the entry fee's, judging the contest and also holding the prizes (which can be changed by you at anytime due to amount of entries you receive).

As for getting a few neutral judges, they only need to be picked randomly from the general Eve population and don't necessarily need to have a history or background in Art. They could be offered some sort of reimbursement for their time, such as a Faction module, etc. Hell, I myself have been artistically inclined all my life. I studied Commercial Art for over 6 years and have extensive experience in all art mediums.

Lastly, having some alts claim that this is all on the up and up doesn't mean anything, just like my statements don't mean anything to you.

Lastly, having some alts claim that this is all on the up and up doesn't mean anything, just like my statements don't mean anything to you.

It's so cute when they think I'm an alt. ^^

People are entirely too paranoid in EVE. You're sucking the life out of my Internet spaceships. So what if it is a scam contest? 99% of the people who do enter probably don't even notice when 20 million goes missing from their wallets. If it is and X played us all for fools, then good for him. He's a few million or even billion richer and his participants don't notice/care/care enough to take the time out of their day to say anything about it.

But it's cool. You've never heard of this guy, so he must be disreputable. I get it. I'll be sure to check and see if you know the guy running a contest before I enter in the future.

Well, I'm not going to spend time researching another players history just like you obviously didn't bother to research mine.

I've been extremely active in Eve and in the Forums for 3 1/2 years and I personally know some of the well-known players in the game. Just because you make statements as fact and have a character that's 7 years old doesn't prove you correct, trustworthy or make the contest Legit.

All of my questions and viewpoints are valid and justified.

If your commodity businesses are so very successful, then there is no need to charge an entry fee, plain and simple. As I stated in my earlier post, new players don't have that type of isk available. As for running a scam contest and having your business reputation being at stake, I highly doubt that would happen since the commodity businesses are a separate entity.

Doesn't matter if you bought the items or prizes and can show proof in a contract. The only acceptable proof is having the prizes secured and held in escrow by a neutral well known secure 3rd party.

Since this is supposedly the first of many contests being planned for the future, it makes sense to have the initial contest free for everyone to enter. That would create a lot of excellent publicity which is always good for future business.

Quote:

Entering a contest is taking a chance, and no risk should be without a little sacrifice. Also, the website domain cost me 10 bucks, not to mention all of my time and effort organizing and advertising, and everyone knows that time is money. It's also possible I could actually lose isk hosting this contest. Since this is an initial experiment for me to gauge the amount of interest, it's conceivable that future contests may have a lower entry fee.

Your quoted statement is not relevant to the validity of this contest. That is all overhead costs due to you deciding to invest your time and real life money to create this contest with the intention to make a lot of easy in-game isk for you. I don't see how you could lose any isk hosting this contest. Especially since you're the one who is sponsoring the contest, collecting up the entry fee's, judging the contest and also holding the prizes (which can be changed by you at anytime due to amount of entries you receive).

As for getting a few neutral judges, they only need to be picked randomly from the general Eve population and don't necessarily need to have a history or background in Art. They could be offered some sort of reimbursement for their time, such as a Faction module, etc. Hell, I myself have been artistically inclined all my life. I studied Commercial Art for over 6 years and have extensive experience in all art mediums.

Lastly, having some alts claim that this is all on the up and up doesn't mean anything, just like my statements don't mean anything to you.

I still stand by my original reply to this thread.

That's fine my friend. Your statements do indeed mean something to me, as they are all legitimate questions and concerns. However, it seems nothing I do or say regarding this contest will be to your satisfaction, and that's fine as well. This is the way I've gone about setting it up to the best of my ability, and if you're not happy with the way I've gone about it, then all I can suggest is that you think up and create your own website/contest and give away your isk to strangers for free, as you suggest. The fact is there will always be people who will think this contest is a scam, even after the prizes have been awarded, and you are one of them. I've stated all the facts as honestly as I can, and there's nothing more I can do. End of story.

The initial main idea for Eveportraits.com was for a website to view player portraits. My idea for a contest only came later, when I was thinking of how to generate interest and traffic. In fact, I'm now taking submissions free-of-charge, and these portraits can be viewed in the Gallery. This is entirely separate from the Contest. You are welcome to submit your portrait if you would like it on the website for free. Thanks and fly safe!

The Eve Portraits contest is a brand-new competition to see who can create the most outstanding Eve Online character portrait.

The reason why I decided to create this contest, is because I thought this would be a really easy way to make ISK

^^Fixed by your friendly edit Faerie :)

Now if you really wanna call his bluff don't enter and leave it at such a low amount of contestants he doesn't make any ISK.....

... yeah I am in a bad mood.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not making any isk from this contest -- I'm losing it. Rule #5 is being removed, and I'll still be awarding all the prizes to the winners. I'm sure you will still just claim, wrongly, that they will either be alts of mine or friends. No matter what I do, you'll still just enjoy crying "scam!" Some people just can't seem to wrap their brains around the fact that this is a legitimate portrait website and contest. What's funny is that you really believe I'd go through all this time and effort just to scam for a few hundred million isk, when I make that much with my business in a day or week. Regardless, you are still very welcome to submit your portrait for display in the Gallery on the website -- for free. Cheers!

Posted - 2011.12.15 11:28:00 -
[23] - Quote
I support REALITY X and his efforts, and I'm also withdrawing my entry in the contest to show that I'm not just saying this to have a bigger chance of winning, you can keep the entry fee to help cover the expenses.

I support REALITY X and his efforts, and I'm also withdrawing my entry in the contest to show that I'm not just saying this to have a bigger chance of winning, you can keep the entry fee to help cover the expenses.

Good luck to all !

Thanks for your support.

And to everyone reading this, I can sum it up in the shortest possible way i can...

I'm doing this contest and portrait website for fun - yours and mine.Enjoy EvePortraits.com! Brought to you by Dark Star MegaCorp

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